“I go on the principle that a public debt is a public curse, and in a Republican Government a greater curse than any other”
James Madison
“I, however, place economy among the first and most important republican virtues, and public debt as the greatest of the dangers to be feared.”
Thomas Jefferson
“Debt is the fatal disease of republics, the first thing and the mightiest to undermine governments and corrupt the people”
Wendell Phillips
“You cannot spend your way out of a recession or borrow your way out of debt... You know and we know and you know that we know that it's nonsense... The European Commission has said so. The markets say so, ... In a few months, the voters will have their chance to say so, too. They can see what the markets have seen: that you are the devalued Prime Minister of a devalued Government"”
Daniel Hannan
“We don't have a trillion-dollar debt because we haven't taxed enough; we have a trillion-dollar debt because we spend too much”
Ronald Reagan
“I am for a government rigorously frugal and simple, applying all the possible savings of the public revenue to the discharge of the national debt; and not for a multiplication of officers and salaries merely to make partisans, and for increasing, by”
“They're never going to be repaid. Adam Smith said that no government had ever repaid its debts and the same can be said of the private sector. The U.S. government does not intend to repay its trillion dollar debt to foreign central banks and, even if it did intend to, there's no way in which it could. Most of the corporations now are avoiding paying their pension fund debts and their health care debts.”
Michael Hudson
